What is Salesforce Genie?
Whether this is your first encounter with the term "Salesforce Genie" or you're a seasoned Salesforce pro, you might be wondering: “What exactly is Salesforce Genie?"
“Salesforce Genie makes every part of the Customer 360 real-time so that every business can deliver magical customer experiences” - Salesforce
Salesforce Genie is one of Salesforce's most important new innovations. It lays the groundwork for highly customized, real-time client experiences.
For many companies, data is still being duplicated and stored in silos despite the widespread use of new technologies. Genie is here to change that.
In today's world, it’s hard to ignore the fact that customer service is at the forefront of every type of business, whether it be B2B, B2C OR B2B2C. Customers of all sizes and backgrounds expect easy, integrated and seamless experiences. Every business, whether it is a wholesale food supplier or a fashion retailer, must prioritise customer experiences to survive.
“A New Data Platform Powering the World’s First Real-Time CRM” - Salesforce
The purpose of Salesforce Genie is to help businesses make sense of the vast amount of data that has been gathered. Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform is powered by Genie, which combines data from all touchpoints, channels, and data streams.
What can Genie help with?
Salesforce Genie is an exciting new development that can transform the way brands understand and interact with their customers. Here are some of the things Genie can help with:
Real-time information and unified profiles
Salesforce Genie lets you access and understand customer data and movements as they happen. The platform also connects all customer data across different platforms into a single customer graph.
Having access to these real-time, unified customer profiles helps businesses make faster, more informed decisions. In turn, this allows them to enhance and personalise the customer journey when it will have the greatest impact.
Digital and physical connections
Genie allows you to connect your customer data from any app, device, or real-time stream. This helps you optimise every touchpoint to enhance both physical and digital customer experiences with your brand.
Industry-specific
Genie works across all industries, enabling all types of businesses to provide a more personalised experience for customers. This includes offering industry-specific tools that will have a greater impact on the customer journey and business growth.
B2C scaling
One of the major advantages of Salesforce Genie is that it connects you to all customer touchpoints in real-time. This enables more seamless, two-way customer connectivity for brands, which can significantly impact the growth of B2C businesses.
How is Genie built?
Genie works by connecting and storing all customer data at a massive scale. It creates a single, dynamic source of truth in all customer actions. This is presented as the real-time customer graph.
Genie does this by taking billions of data points from any touchpoint or system so that you can understand exactly what a customer does. This is achieved through the use of partnerships (google, amazon ads, meta, AWS and snowflake) that extend Genie’s functionality with data, AI, and advertising innovation.
What is a customer data platform?
A customer data platform (CDP) is an important marketing tool that collects and unifies customer data from a wide range of sources. Basically, it will gather any first-party customer data from different touchpoints and databases. Then it puts this information together to create a coherent and complete view of each individual customer.
Marketers can create more precisely targeted and individualised campaigns with the aid of such a comprehensive, unified customer overview.
Understanding your customers and their journey as thoroughly as possible is the key to effective marketing, and a CDP supports this.
What’s the difference between CDP and CRM?
So what's the difference between a CDP (Customer Data Platform) and a CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?
While both tools gather customer data, they each have a different purpose in the way they manage this data.
A CDP is designed to collect and display all data on customer behaviour with your product or services. It is an essential part of customer journey management and understanding how a customer moves through a funnel with different brand touchpoints.
A CRM collects, manages and stores all data about customer-facing interactions with your business. A CRM is a practical sales tool that can be used to determine where customers stand in the sales pipeline and how they have been treated throughout their journey.
Salesforce Genie vs Salesforce CDP
Salesforce Genie follows the same overall purpose as Salesforce CDP, which is to understand and unify customer data. However, it is not the same marketing platform. Instead, Salesforce Genie is an evolution of CDP.
The main difference is that Genie works in real-time and has been integrated into the Salesforce platform, making it easier for businesses to gain effective insights from it. This is different from Salesforce CDP which only exists in Marketing Cloud.
This means Genie takes Salesforce’s CDP functionality and extends all its possibilities of it across the entire Customer 360, helping you take advantage of more data.
Salesforce Genie vs Customer 360
Customer 360 refers to Salesforce's entire CRM platform. Salesforce Genie works across the platform by collecting data from every data source your business has and combining it with your Customer 360 data.
Genie has already helped brands like Ford, L’Oreal, Formula 1® and PGA TOUR Superstore.
Businesses like PGA TOUR Superstore have seen significant benefits from using Genie and having a complete overview of their customer data.
Here’s what Jill Thomas, CMO at PGA TOUR Superstore had to say:
“We’re much more in control of our messaging and are able to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. This allows us to be truly customer-driven and meet people where they are in their journey with the game.”
How investing in Genie can help deliver your best customer experience and transform your business
Investing in the right CDP will allow you to provide more personalized experiences to your customers. And by improving the customer experience, you will improve customer loyalty, boost your brand’s reputation, and see greater business growth.
With the help of Genie, businesses can better map out the full customer journey, find potential points of friction, and improve their services in response.
Without Genie, businesses might have to use multiple software applications to learn more about how their marketing efforts affect their customers. This can get expensive and confusing.
Genie can also help brands improve their customer activation. This is all about sending the right message to the customer on the right channel at the right time so that they move along the sales funnel.
Overall, Genie lets you use real-time data to enhance every experience a customer has with your brand. By gaining total visibility into the customer journey and optimising each step, you’ll be able to significantly boost the customer experience, customer acquisition, and brand loyalty.
